James Branch Cabell Quotes

I think what defines our band is really that, you know, we're just living our dream and making records that we love and having a good time.

Poetry is the morning dream of great minds.

What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.

The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.

So I never spend a lot of time analyzing why people respond to my work. But I think that it's just the joy, a passion for life, that I think has always been in my characters. Beyond that, I'm just grateful for it.

If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.

But if you're talking about fine art work, then I think you have to ask yourself some pretty deep questions about why it is you want to take pictures and what it is you want to say.

When I sit down to write, I consider myself an artist.

Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.

As an artist, I often wonder what my purpose is or why I do what I do.

I think there's art, and then there's illustration. Art comes from a deeper place.

Most joyful let the Poet be, it is through him that all men see.

When you look at a wall spotted with stains...you may discover a resemblance to various landscapes, beautiful with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees. Or again, you may see battles and figures in action, or strange faces and costumes, and an endless variety of objects which you could reduce to complete and well-drawn figures.

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.

I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares, as opposed to ugly things. That's my intent.

Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas, sometimes with chisel on stone, sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul's worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of indefinite music, but clearest and most permanent, in words.

Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.

One of the proud joys of the man of letters - if that man of letters is an artist - is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory.

Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.

I believe in previous lives and the Muse—and that books and music exist before they are written and that they are propelled into material being by their own imperative to be born, via the offices of those willing servants of discipline, imagination and inspiration whom we call artists.

My dreams are my work. I design out of the things that I love.

I'm still happy with the way Einstein's Dreams came out. That book came out of a single inspiration. I really felt like I was not creating the words, that I was hearing the words. That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don't think it could happen with a long book.

I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension